Keeping it Simple

Menu

Author Archives: Derrick Stanley

One of the most important elements to launching your successful ICO is the existence of a successful core team. This team can be of any size so long as it performs all of the key required functions. Most people already know this, but the question comes up when starting a project. Where do you find and recruit a professional team you can trust to help you on your journey. Let’s identify a few key areas.

Deciding on Your Requirements

As with any team, you must decide on the skills you need to add in order to make the project a success. When it comes to ICOs, you will most likely need people with expertise in the areas of marketing, blockchain development, security, and legal compliance. Naturally, you should also consider which elements of these roles you can successfully fill too. Once you have done this, the search is on.

Where to Search

It may be tempting to get all of your friends on board to share in your potential success. Though this is a good strategy from a trust perspective, you should consider their professional experiences, reputations, and above all, what element of value can they provide ton investors. Forums such as BitcoinTalk and groups on Telegram can be good starting points. This is in addition to LinkedIn and employing some mechanisms to verify the quality of members.

Validations

You can go a long way toward validating the credentials of your team members by checking out their LinkedIn pages and searching through some community forums and their past projects. It is vitally important that you do perform the necessary due diligence on your own team members because ultimately, if you fail to do so, your investors will not be so blasé.

Team Management

Once the team is together, you may think the hard work is done. That is certainly not the case. If you wish to keep the project on track, you will have to maintain a continuous check on the progress of the team. This should be merely supervisory in nature and just enough to ensure they are meeting the targets you have set in terms of performance.

The market may be going through a bit of a tough time, but that has not discouraged people from getting involved in starting their new crypto investments. The number one thought running through the minds of many first time investors….after the thought of potential gains, is, “how much should I invest initially when I buy cryptocurrency?” Here are a few key points to consider when making your decision.

Belief in the Project

Just like any traditional investment, you should consider how much your truly believe in the mission of the project. This will ultimately determine how much you will be willing to invest. This will also influence your management strategy when it comes to changes in the market. The more you believe in the project, the more resolute you will be in your decision making. Just be sure that your trust is well founded.

Market Conditions

As we mentioned, the market is currently at quite a low point. This can present somewhat of an opportunity for you to obtain value for money on your favored tokens if you have the bravery to do so. In the long-term, this can reap dividends for you. You need to just be as certain as possible that the market has reached the bottom or that you are willing to hold on and avoid panic selling in any situation.

Affordability

The single most important factor when deciding whether or not to invest takes priority over all of the other points in this article and that is to make sure you can actually afford to invest the amount which you have decided. Too many people get into investments of all kinds outside of their budget. This is usually due to a fear of missing out. You cannot afford to be one of these people. Besides everything else, this quickly clouds your judgement and has a negative impact on your trading decisions.

The current market for crypto is seemingly a world away from the situation which we found at the back end of 2017. Gone are the free flowing profits that the market of the time provided all comers. Presented with the current bear market conditions, many will wonder what to do with their current holdings and whether it is correct to continue on the crypt investment journey. What then should we consider?

Position Size

A lot of your decision making will be influenced correctly by the size of your position. Many will be happy to keep a hold of smaller amounts and wait for an uptake. That being said, those with bigger positions which were hoping, or banking on a positive return, may be in a completely different situation. Nobody can tell you what your best course of action would be, just to consider the size of your position and whether you can afford to lose it.

HODL for Better Times

If you frequent many popular crypto forums or Reddit groups, you may see a lot of enthusiasm to HODL or Hold your investment and wait for more positive conditions. This is a strategy which, if you can afford it, has historically paid off. The situation is altogether different though if you were relying on a positive return which has now turned negative.

Buy More in the “Sale”

This is another piece of advice you may often hear from online communities. Those who have been around the sector for a long time may advise you to actually increase your position size, thus, taking advantage of the reduced values in the market. This can be well heeded if you truly believe in the project and are in the investment for the long haul.

Don’t Panic

The number one most important thing that you should not do in down times is panic. This can be true of all things in life, but in this case you investments. Panic selling is never recommended. Many who engage in doing so often rebuy again when they see the market starting to recover and repeating this trend only leads to big losses. Hold out if you can. Things will improve.

According to a report that was recently released by Forbes, Japan’s Financial Services Agency, the FSA is working diligently to ban three popular cryptocurrencies within the country due to their frequent use of pirates and hackers. Still, despite this threat looming over the world of cryptocurrency, market prices remain stable.

A Tool That Promotes Piracy

The cryptocurrency that the FSA is looking to ban are Zcash, Monero and Dash. According to Forbes, anonymous sources have reported that these cryptocurrencies are extremely difficult to track making it nearly impossible for the FSA to regulate the transactions made with these currencies. Furthermore, this makes them a popular tool that can be used to abet internet piracy.

The FSA has officially ruled that these three cryptocurrencies are a safe haven for internet hackers who can easily use them to finance illegal activities such as tax evasion and money laundering. As an example, one could state the recent criminal activities that took place in Japan earlier this year when Coincheck, a massive and very popular exchange platform suffered a cyber attack that saw hackers get away with roughly 500,000,000 NEM tokens.

Another interesting fact is that Coincheck was one of the exchange sites that made use of all three of these cryptocurrencies. Then, after the hacking, due to a request from the FSA, the platform simply walked away from using Dash, Zcash and Monero.

Furthermore, the Financial Services Agency also issued at formal warning to other platforms that are looking to use these three types of cryptocurrencies. While they may still be allowed to operate, the use of these cryptocurrencies could result in a much slower approval process.

The Other Suspects

Of course, while there is no solid evidence condemning these cryptocurrencies of doing anything wrong, there are other reasons that have raised warning flags within the FSA.

After the massive heist that took place on Coincheck, another platform known as MyEtherWallet was the victim of another cyber attack that saw losses of $150,000 in Ethereum. And, according to some speculation, this sum was then traded on the Binance platform and could have easily contained the 500,000,000 NEM tokens from the Coincheck hacking.

Therefore, the Japanese government has ordered Binance to cease and desist all operations within the country’s borders. The company was also issued a formal warning that they would face criminal charges if they did not comply with the order.

Low Trade Volume

Despite the complexity of the situation, it should be noted that Zcash, Monero and Dash are far from being the most popular cryptocurrencies on the blockchain. The trio average somewhere in between 5,000 and 10,000 total transactions daily, which is paltry compared to Ethereum which records an average of a million trades per day.

Blockchain is the underlying technology that allows cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to function in the way that they do. And, although many people are still skeptical about cryptocurrency, we have seen a steady growth in the number of people who are interested in blockchain technology.

In addition to the countless start-up companies that have been using the technology, now, ING Direct has decided to begin experimenting with blockchain and is investing more and more in terms of innovation.

ING Innovative Blockchain Project

At the end of last year, ING surprised the world by announcing the release of their Zero Knowledge Range Proof project. Aimed at improving confidentiality, as well as reducing operation costs, the project was designed for institutions that have been interested in using blockchain’s public registry but have been reluctant to reveal their information to their competition.

The ZKRP project is meant to allow transactions between parties without revealing any of their delicate information. For example, it would show a sum that is within a specified range but not show the exact amount of the transaction.

According the ING Direct’s blockchain manager, the ZKRP is an effective way to disguise a transaction names, while still providing enough information to validate that the sum is sufficient to settle a transaction.

Furthermore, ING has also made improvement to the blockchain and have introduced something known as a Zero Knowledge Set Membership. The entire Zero Knowledge concept had originally been intended for uses other than number, however, the protocol can be used for a variety of different applications. For example, it would be able to confirm things such as nation’s involvement in a project by revealing that they are part of the European Nation, while not disclosing which country they are.

Getting Involved with The Blockchain Community

The Zero Knowledge is an open source project and can, therefore, be viewed by anyone who wishes to do so. This makes it much easier to find flaws in the system and to be able to improve upon them. For example, recently two developers were able to find a security flaw in the ZKRPm which allowed ING to correct this and improve their system.

This type of open sourcing is great and allows the entire global community to contribute blockchain project. Furthermore, it represents an excellent way for university students and new developers to share their ideas and opinions with the world.

ING Direct: A Blockchain Expert

To date, the bank’s efforts with developing blockchain technology have been recognized on a global scale and have made them a prominent player in the industry. Moreover, ING was recently invited to join in a workshop, in which efforts are being made to standardize the Zero-Proof Knowledge system. This, along with the company’s other effort have made them a prominent figure in the world of blockchain technology.